Hotels, Beware: Bed Bugs Prefer THIS Color Sheet

You already know the one thing you absolutely must do upon entering a hotel room to prevent a bed bug infestation in your suitcase (if you don't, read this), but now there's something hotels can do to ward off bugs. Well, maybe.

A new study in the Journal of Medical Entomology has found that bed bugs prefer the color red above all other hues (not so shocking, considering they eat blood), with black coming in second. Luckily we can't think of any hotels with red sheets—or, for that matter, black ones—but we also can't think of any with green or yellow sheets. And that matters, because the researchers found that those are bed bugs' least favorite colors.

How do we know this? To conduct their research, the scientists folded cards in different colors, creating little "tents" that fit into petri dishes. They then released bed bugs in the dishes, too, and gave them ten minutes to choose a hiding spot. Twenty-nine percent of the time, the bugs moved toward the red tent, and 23 percent of the time they chose black. For the most part, they stayed away from the green and yellow tents. Likewise, "significantly more" eggs were found in red, blue, orange, and black tents than green ones. That matters: Female bed bugs can produce anywhere from two to five eggs a day, or about 500 in a lifetime.

The bed bugs were tested with various factors in mind, including sex. And there were differences: While red and black were the most preferred, female bed bugs "significantly preferred" lilac shades compared to male ones. The researchers also tested starved bugs versus fed bugs, bugs of different ages, and groups versus loners.

Bed bugs are known to occur in even the highest-end hotels, and this research suggests that green or yellow sheets might not be the worst idea for properties. But Corraine McNeill, Ph.D., a co-author of the study, says not so fast—the study's results are more promising for creating bed bug traps than anything else, for now. "I always joke with people, 'Make sure you get yellow sheets!'" she said in a news release. "But to be very honest, I think that would be stretching the results a little too much. I think using colors to monitor and prevent bed bugs would have to be specifically applied to some sort of trap, and it would have to be used along with another strategy for control. I don't know how far I would go to say don't get a red suitcase or red sheets, but the research hasn't been done yet, so we can't really rule that out completely."